


it's a Cold and Broken Hallelujah

by jairose



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: But I wrote it and I don't know it just came out, Captain America: The First Avenger, I don't know why I do this to myself, I know, I'll count this one as:, It's probably horrible, It's probably morbid, Like, Plane crash scene, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers thinking he is dying, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, What he was thinking the entire time, really don't know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-10 11:50:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6983767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jairose/pseuds/jairose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve’s final moments before he is frozen inside the Hydra Plane to save New York, because he’s a super soldier. Of course he’d been awake for his body freezing.<br/>[Because I'm a horrible person, that's why.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's a Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“ - on your toes.”

The radio cuts out on Steve’s end before he had even finished telling Peggy his last words, flopping belly, nose, first into the giant tundra in front of him. And it’s jarring. Sure it is. He’s not buckled in so he goes flying, smacks the window and comes out of it still alive, dazed, bleeding from his head, his nose, parts of his face he knew could bleed but had never guessed would.

The compass that houses Peggy’s picture smashes into a few pieces and lands on the floor. In seventy years, they’ll have found it and inferred all that needed to be taken from it. But for now, it hits Steve in a way that makes him breath jagged.

 _I’m alive._ Is all he can think in vauge horror. He’d been expecting a quick death. A quick, painless, empty death.

Well. Not so empty. He was going out a hero, after all. Saving New York. Saving everyone.

Groggily, Steve feels the change in temperature immediately. The hull had been breached before the fall, but now it seemed to shatter even more as outside, the world pushed in. Glass shattered as ice forced itself through. The engines that were still working, still red hot, melted gallons of water.

That all went directly to the frontmost part of the Hydra plane.

He feels his toes wet. Then numb. He stares dumbly down as it creeps up his calf, his thigh, where he’s sitting on them. He can’t move. He doesn’t really have a reason too, anyway. If he moves, he might warm up, but that will just delay the inevitable.

Nobody is coming. Not in enough time for it to matter anyway. He’ll be long gone by the time they find his body.

A sardonic, rueful smirk pulls at his mouth as he realizes he and Bucky might be thousands of miles away, but their resting places are strikingly similar. Different times, different places, but all this ice.

Well. It was almost like it was meant to be.

The water reaches his hips, his groin freezes and it's not so much pain as just not knowing how to feel that he was now numb from his hips down. The water is slowing down to an almost trickle. Yet, it’s also not. He can hear the groaning of metal bending under the force of a flood. It picks up speed.

Steve leans his head back against the consol. Staring up, he can see half his available vision is ice, the other half is metal, and there is the tiniest, teeniest sliver of blue, blue skies. His ma used to tell him his eyes reminded her of warm summer days, because of just the right shade of blue they were.

Bucky used to say they were like sapphires. Which was bullshit, since when would either of them have ever seen sapphire? But Steve allowed it anyway. Just blushing and tucking his head and acting like an idiot.

He doesn’t need to act anymore.

Everyone he loves is either dead or far away, safe.

He is an idiot.

Why hadn’t he tried hard to find a different way? Why hadn’t he veered off course and just let SSR find him? Why hadn’t he tried to save himself?

Steve knew the answer to those questions, and it had been the things he hadn’t said to Peggy that made all the difference, didn’t it?

_I love you._

_Bucky’s gone._

_Bucky’s gone._

_My family is gone._

**It’s my choice** , he had said instead, and if Peggy knew him, she knew that wasn’t what he was really saying. She’d let him get away with it, as a parting gift, but no, she knew. No. He’d really been saying was:

_Please. It’s going to end soon. The war. Everything. Me. Just let me end it my way._

Even at a trickle, the water is coming fast. It’s up to his bellybutton now. Soon it will be at his chest. Then his heart will really feel the pain. Or maybe not. Who knows? He’s a super soldier, everything about him came from a bottle that hadn’t been tested or trialed. Howard was a good man, but Steve knew exactly what he was to Howard. A friend, perhaps later, as they got to know each other, but a 'success!' was the more apt and better held title. And if there was one thing Stark had loved, it was a 'success!'.

He was the guinea pig. Maybe his death would give them answers.

He must have lost more time in his mind than he thinks, because now his chest is numb. And it **hurts**. His body finally warning him. Trying to warm him up. Yet, Steve doesn’t move. Doesn’t move to help facilitate the change.

The air is like daggers now. Every breath is worse than any asthma attack he ever faced, because his lungs just refuse to give up. Before, his body had been trying to kill him and he had hated it. Now his body was trying to save him and all he could beg for was death.

He remembers warm hands carding through his hair. It’s a phantom image imprinted in his brain. Feels a warm kiss to his cheek. He feels like sobbing with relief as his fingers lose all feeling now, his legs jelly. He can’t feel, and its worse, of course its worse than feeling, but it’s also better.

Steve doesn’t know how long it takes, but soon it’s up to his chin and the sides around him are turning into slush and his teeth chatter and he couldn’t speak a word even if he wants to, but he doesn’t, so that’s at least a relief. Then his heart starts to slow. The serum inside of him, the super part of him, slowing down, sleeping.

Steve does panic a little then, but it’s like a blip on a radar. There for a second, before it's swallowed up by nothing.

It’s so much a relief that everything is growing blurry and dizzily out of focus and all he can do is smile and cry, which is strange because the tears are cold and they stain his cheeks, and it's not alright, not a bit, but it’s almost like his final farewell to himself.

And when the water breeches over his head, and he is fully underwater, Steve is almost confused why he is still conscious. Why his eyes are still open and he can see the whitest landscape around him through the lens of blue, clear water. Why his breath is scratching at his throat, and he realizes he’s been holding it, because he’d been ready to die, but to drown? Wasn’t that a bit much to ask?

Steve knows nobody asked. Steve knows it wouldn’t have mattered because his lungs hurt, and all he sees is white, and it’s still so beautiful, isn’t it? Even as he knows death is right around the corner and his lungs hurt but everything else is numb. And for a while, he won’t guess how long, he holds his breath, and his lungs are the only thing inside of him moving, and he is losing consciousness, but not his breath.

His heart makes an answering beat, as if to say, hey, I’m still here.

Until finally, it all lets go. His lungs seize, bubbles erupt from his mouth and everything is still white as he loses control of everything. As water pours down his throat, chills him more than the numbness around him, and still.

All he sees is a landscape of white. And he shuts his eyes because he can’t look at it anymore. He can’t.

He should have seen Bucky a last time. He should have seen Brooklyn one last time. He should have had so many lasts, and he’s still had so few firsts.

In seventy some odd years, when they find him, they will think he was frozen immediately. When he awakens, he won’t tell them differently. He won’t tell anyone but Bucky almost seven years after that, when they are both in better places, mentally, physically. And he won’t even hint to anyone else about it, but Natasha will pry like she always does as soon as Bucky (James she calls him) knows, and then Clint heckles too.

But still Steve only tells a few. And only at very low points in his life. And only when he knows that it's the only thing that can be said.

But. Let’s not dwell on the future. That’s a long, long while away though, and Steve is in the here, the now, and the freezing. And all he can think about is how it still hadn’t been good enough, had it? How he still ended up dying. How Bucky still ended up dying. But it was worth it. If Hydra was gone... it was worth it.

... wasn’t it?

* * *

And then he wakes up. 

**Author's Note:**

> This came about as I was re-watching the first Cap movie. Because, I think with Steve's near-photographic memory, of COURSE he would remember all this, and it would really mess with him, especially as he knows only ice and cold one second and then warmth and comfort the next. He was on guard the second he opened his eyes, seventy years later, and he doesn't stop being on guard for even longer.  
> Anyways, thanks for reading!  
> I'm a horrible person. Did I say that already?  
> (also CapIsNotANazi2k16FightMe)


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